Lou Clark: Playwright as Director
By Inara Cedrins
Lou Clark is part
artist and part social activist. Though she identifies as a
playwright first, she has worked in nearly every area of theater
including directing, producing, acting, stage management, theater
education, dramaturgy, designing, and venue management. A
native of Connecticut, Clark received her B.A. in theater (acting
emphasis) and English from Manhattanville College in Purchase, New
York.
After completing
her undergraduate studies, she decided to take the worldly
possessions that would fit in her car and head west to Seattle.
Her impetus for moving there was to complete a yearlong volunteer
service program in which she worked as a felony-paralegal for the
public defender’s office. This experience was life-changing
and the beginning of Clark’s interest in partnering her artistic
work with her belief in social justice. She loved Seattle and
soon became a member of its thriving arts community. Her work was
produced in several theaters and festivals during the seven years
she lived in the Emerald City.
When Clark could
identify nonprofit organizations whose missions were in keeping with
the work she was creating, she sought to partner with them,
promoting their missions and also donating the box-office take from
her plays to them. Organizations she worked with included the
Alzheimer’s Association of Western Washington; New Beginnings, which
provides resources to battered women and their children; and New
Connections, an agency that helps offenders get back on their feet
after being released from prison. She is quick to say, “I learned
by doing in the Seattle theater scene.”
Her work and motto
earned Clark a coveted season-long artistic internship at Seattle
Repertory Theatre, where she assisted professional directors
including Daniel Sullivan and Stephen Wadsworth and also playwright
August Wilson. During her time at Seattle Rep, she watched
these artists work and gained a new appreciation for what it takes
to produce theater at a professional level. She decided she
wanted to further her technical skills as a playwright and to have
time and space to write.
In 2003 Clark moved
to Albuquerque to begin the M.F.A. Dramatic Writing Program at UNM.
She was drawn here by UNM’s growing new play festival, Words Afire.
Clark knew she would have the opportunity to see her plays in full
production at UNM—a very rare experience for M.F.A. students
elsewhere. She was also offered a graduate assistantship as
the associate producer for the festival. During her time as a
student she produced more than eighty plays for the Words Afire
Festival, four of them her own. Six of these world-premiere scripts
went on to win national playwriting awards from the Kennedy Center
American College Theater Festival, including Clark’s own play I
Sea, winner of the 2006 Kennedy Center Theater for Youth Award.
As an award-winner
Clark was invited to go to Washington, D.C., to participate in
workshops with professional playwrights; most notably Lee Blessing,
Marsha Norman, and Timberlake Wertenbaker. She also had the
opportunity to hear an excerpt of her winning play read by Equity
actors in the Terrace Theater of the Kennedy Center. “Going to
the Kennedy Center was thrilling. It has been an amazing part
of my graduate-school experience. It wouldn’t have happened if
we didn’t have the Words Afire Festival pushing us to take our work
further, into full production, rather than merely showcasing it as
staged readings. Theater professionals nationwide are
beginning to take notice of the Dramatic Writing Program at UNM,”
Clark says.
Through the
festival, she has worked with most theaters in Albuquerque. She has
also taught playwriting to adults with developmental disabilities at
the VSA North Fourth Art Center and has collaborated on three
original plays with Equilibrium Theater, VSA’s resident
mixed-ability company. Her work has also been seen locally in
full production at Sol Arts and the Vortex.
Somehow, in the
midst of writing, producing, and teaching, Clark has simultaneously
found time to continue her directing work. In the past few
years she has directed short plays for the Words Afire Festival,
I Am My Own Wife at the Vortex, and The 7 New Play
Festival at the Cell Theater. Her writing and directing work
culminated in her thesis project titled Playwright as Director,
in which she explored what she had learned about dramatic form
through directing her M.F.A. thesis play, Searching for
Calliopeia.
Her thesis work
earned Clark a Regional Directing Award and an honorable mention for
the National Student Director Award from the 2007 Kennedy Center
American College Theater Festival. Just a month shy of
graduating with distinction from UNM, Clark went off again to the
Kennedy Center. This time she directed a staged reading of NYU
graduate student Ross Maxwell’s play Grand Delusions and
participated in a master class with John Dillon, who has directed at
most of the country’s leading regional theaters. With these
accolades Clark became the first M.F.A. student from UNM to earn
national attention from KCACTF for both writing and directing.
Despite this
success Clark doesn’t always direct her own work; she values
collaborator Clareann Despain (who directed Clark’s award-winning
I Sea). Clark and Despain met as graduate students.
Despain completed her M.A. in directing at UNM in 2005 and is now a
doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Clark speaks thoughtfully of Despain: “Over the past few years
Clareann and I have really developed a solid partnership as director
and playwright. We don’t always agree, but I always trust her
to be honest and respectful and, most importantly, I trust that she
will always serve the needs of the play before her own ego. This
quality is of the utmost importance in a director, especially in the
new-play development process, because one is working with living,
breathing playwrights.” The two have started a production company
called Ka-Hootz, based in Albuquerque and focusing on touring new
work that Clark and Despain develop together—despite the miles
currently between them.
The play in the works
for Clark right now is Dale Dunn’s Body Burden, opening
September 14 at the Adobe Theater here. The production is best
described as the personal story of protagonist Katie Pendleton, set
against the backdrop of infamous local history, the development of
the atomic bomb. The piece features a six-member ensemble,
including local favorites Alan Hudson, Laurie Lister (as Katie),
Ninette Mordaunt, and Vernon Poitras (as the ghost of Dr. Robert
Oppenheimer), joined by talented newcomers Morgan Black and Don
Garcia.
Katie Pendleton is a
broken woman. Though she has won a battle with thyroid cancer
just prior to the opening of the play, the strain has cost her the
life of her unborn child and, ultimately, her marriage. The
play begins as middle-aged Katie returns from San Francisco to Los
Alamos, her childhood home, to search for answers to her present
troubles. She is met by her divorced parents, Fran, a woman in
denial, and Will, a man filled with rage. Katie receives
unlikely assistance in her search from David Lucero, a San Ildefonso
man who has admired Katie since they were both in high school
together; from a Girl Scout who has mysteriously traveled through
time from 1966 Toledo, Ohio, to present-day Los Alamos; and from the
ghost of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who cannot rest until he helps
Katie—and redeeming his own soul by so doing.
“What is Lou like
as a director?” I ask playwright Dunn, who responds: “She’s astute,
direct, and she asks the tough questions that need to be answered
for the play to be whole, so that actors know what they are bringing
to the play.” “My approach is completely informed by my work as a
playwright,” Clark adds. “The actors are doing a lot of script
analysis now, because it’s a new play.” Clark notes again that
new work is the most stimulating for her because, as the script
develops, the actors and the production team must dig deeper to
fulfill her goal as a director: to ensure “that everyone involved
works quickly, thoughtfully, and collaboratively to serve the play.”
While Clark is open
to future directing projects in Albuquerque, she plans to focus on
her own writing for the near future. She has three
undertakings in development that all explore identity in relation to
gender. The first is her comedy The Politics of Hair, which
began as a “narrative rant” assignment at UNM. She developed
it with local actress Lisa Fenstermacher, who performed it in April
as a workshop production at the Emerging Artists Theatre in New York
City. The first fully staged production came in June, as part
of Sol Arts’ offerings in conjunction with this year’s Gay Pride
Celebration. Clark plans to revise and tour the production
with Ka-Hootz. She is also working on a play based on British poet
and novelist Radclyffe Hall’s life and work. Clark smiled as
she explained, “Hall was an infamous 20th-century
literary figure. She is most remembered for her novel The
Well of Loneliness, which was the subject of censorship trials
in Britain and America. It is the first novel written in
English to openly refer to lesbianism. The most ironic thing
is that the sexual exploits in the book never go further than
hand-holding and one kiss.” Clark is also writing a play
called The Gay Milonga (the milonga is a form of the tango)
that has three settings: 1970s Argentina, on the brink of the time
of the “disappeared ones”; a science-fiction-influenced future
America; and what Clark calls “the world between time,” where the
ghost of Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges is trapped. When asked
about her style, Clark responds, “I always strive for my work to be
highly theatrical. I want audiences to see something they
could never have seen if they stayed home and watched television.”
For the moment, Lou Clark is excited to have begun rehearsals for
Body Burden, saying, “I feel really fortunate to be working on
this project with Dale and the incredibly talented cast and
production team we’ve been able to bring together. Everyone
involved has made the real investment it takes to bring a new play
to life. We hope the show draws enthusiastic audiences,
especially because it is set here in New Mexico and is written by
one of our own local playwrights.”
